lucia di lammermoor at the metropolitan opera

While the scandal helped launch Zambello’s career elsewhere, it was years before the company again attempted such a radical setting of a major repertory work. The production was quickly withdrawn, replaced by a safe “tragic songbird in a gilded cage” staging. It did not go well: That opening night featured what likely was the loudest and most sustained booing in Met history. Lucia is essentially Romeo and Juliet on operatic steroids with coloratura thrown in, and Zambello came up with an abstract Expressionist approach that focused on Lucia’s descent into madness. Another production of Lucia, by Francesca Zambello in 1992, was the first really bold attempt to shake things up. The Met has long been a bastion for extravagant, but safe, literal productions. At its worst, well, it just looks ridiculous. At its best, it challenges the mind, adding new layers of meaning and freeing warhorses from stale repetition. As opera patrons elsewhere, and especially in Europe, have learned over the past several decades, “regietheater” refers to opera productions in which the stage director makes substantial changes in location, staging, plot, etc., to suggest parallels or to advance entirely new ideas and contexts. NEW YORK - Simon Stone’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera on April 23, is the boldest attempt ever to bring full-on “ regie” to the Met.

A scene from Act I of Donizetti’s ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ with Javier Camarena as Edgardo and Nadine Sierra as Lucia (on screen).

Lucia di lammermoor at the metropolitan opera